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Posts By bcleggtv

Avid and After Effects artist from Boston, MA. My interests include editing, compositing, color-correcting, making cool things but most of all, I love telling stories. This site will act as a forum for insights on my work as an editor. My goal is for it to be a community of people interested in telling stories in new and innovative ways.

Editing Tip of the Week – Keep it Clean

January 8, 2012 · by bcleggtv

After a successful release of BarryClegg.com last week (over 120 unique visitors in the first day, now, only 5 billion more and I’ll be on par with Google) I am now motivated more than ever to keep this site fresh and informative to any and all who visit. One of my initial goals of this site is to be a source of information and education about all things production. Seeing as my expertise comes from post, I figured why not have a weekly tip? It should be quick, easy, and beneficial the next time you sit down to make your magic in your editing suite.

Sometimes I feel like I could write a book on all the editing tips I have both received and given over my tenure as an editor. They come from all over; my colleagues, watching TV, user groups and dumb luck.

Today’s tip is really more advice than anything, and that is to be organized. This only applies to your edit session, not your whole life. For example, here is a picture of the corner of my room right now. As you can see, it is NOT organized (the fan seems really out of place, right?)

My Room

When it comes to your edit session, being organized is one of the most important things you can be. In today’s world of tight turnarounds, being FAST can sometimes be better than being GOOD. Luckily I am fast AND good, as well as being humble…basically the triple threat. In all seriousness, one of the things I pride myself on is being a fast editor, and the main reason I can be fast is because I am organized, and you should be too. Here is a quick tip to being organized.

Naming Conventions – Naming conventions is the quickest, easiest way to stay organized. It will help you with version control. It will help you find clips. It will help you when in a collaborative environment, e.g. multiple editors on one project or sharing with animators. The best part of this tip is the only requirement is to have a working knowledge of the English language (or Spanish if you are in Spain…or French if you are in France…etc.) Want to know if your naming conventions are working? If the answers to these two questions are always “yes,” then they are working. “Do I know exactly what is in this clip/file/document without having to view it?” and “If someone else works on this, will they know exactly what is in this clip/file/document without having to view it?” If you ever have something that says “Untitled Sequence.01” I better be able to delete it and not get fired.

For sequences I always try to follow this: Client_VideoName_Version# Example: SmithCo_SpringSizzleReel_v4. Depending on where you are working naming conventions may change, but this simple formula should work for most. If you are mastering to full resolution QTs are similar, I suggest something more robust that is more aimed at an archiving system. Client_VideoName_Date_Format_Initials Example SmithCo_SpringSizzleReel_030112_BC. Use whatever works for your workflow. If you are working on spots you should include the ISCI code as well. GEICO_CaveManFootball_ISCI021012H_BC

For clips I always try and follow this: Shot Description_Focal Length_Take# Example Host Dolly Left_MED_T1 or Host Dolly Right_CU_T2. I use WS (wide shot) MED (medium shot) MCU (medium close up) CU (close up) and XCU (extreme close up.) Now, I know those probably aren’t the official film school terms for focal lengths, but I have found that for any given shoot I can divide up the takes into some of those categories and then be able to go back and figure out where the other takes are. If I am working with a clip that has a WS on it, I know that the one I logged with MED is a closer focal length. Not the most scientific system, but it sure does work.

When it comes to naming conventions for clips, the advent of file based acquisition has thrown a wrench into the works. Case in point, Avid AMA bin with files from P2 camera.

Avid AMA bin with P2 footage

Files are ready to edit instantaneously, but nothing has been logged. There are systems out there for on-site and in camera logging, but I suggest doing anything to avoid loading clip after clip to find the shot you need. Might be a good habit to logging clips as you go when dealing with file based workflows. If you are lucky enough, get an assistant editor.

In closing, remember, the more time you spend looking around and figuring out what is what is time you are taking away from storytelling and creativity…and cleaning your room. Trust me, your colleagues and mother with give you the thumbs up.

Good Job!

Welcome to Barry Clegg.com

January 3, 2012 · by bcleggtv

Hello,

I would like to welcome you to BarryClegg.com, a website/blog I have created about the things I have created. Over the last ten years, there have been many a time that the content I have created or helped create has gone unnoticed, so I have decided to now share them with the world.

Here you will find my thoughts, opinions and overall impressions about all things post-production. Most will revolve around editing and compositing, but some will involve industry trends and auxiliary topics that have to do with the work I am involved in.

I invite you to be part of the discussion with your comments, but I do ask that everyone be thoughtful and constructive, and I hold myself to those standards as well.

If there are any discussions or topics you wish to see here, or if you just want to ask my opinion on something, feel free to leave comments on the site. You can also follow me on Twitter @cleggthis.

Regards,

Barry Clegg

Constant Contact :15 Spots

December 26, 2011 · by bcleggtv

Constant Contact is a great international company headquartered in Massachusetts that specializes in email marketing. Now, when I first heard of Constant Contact, maybe like you I immediately thought “Spam.” Nobody likes spam email, or spam comments, or spam anything…that is, unless you like SPAM. What Constant Contact really does is provide an easy, customer centric service for people who are NOT email marketers. More than likely, you have gotten an email from Constant Contact but you didn’t even know it. They are basically taking over email lists that already exist going out to customers who have already expressed interest in them. Let me put it to you this way, if you have ever gotten an email from Rule Boston Camera telling you about the upcoming learning lab, you have gotten an email from Constant Contact.

These were a campaign of 5 x :15 national spots. There were 5 different personal coaches for each spot, and before you ask, yes, these were ACTUAL Constant Contact personal coaches. Their years of service are also accurate, in fact, those were something we changed along they way. These were pretty easy to edit, in fact the footage and keepers were digitized and cut by about 10am, not even enough time for me to get a second cup of coffee. After that was graphics which consisted of a single common end tag and a different doughnut hole, both of which were done in After Effects. The client supplied us with PDFs of email samples. The look was achieved by making everything 3D, applying a single light and then putting a simple move on them. I did each doughnut hole as the same length so that there was some consistency to the move, even though each spot had a different length for that. I did an 8 second move for all 5, that gave me enough pad on either end of the move to then cut into the spot in the Avid.

The end tag was also done in After Effects, although it could have easy been done in Avid as well. One thing I have been doing lately is using After Effects for what I am calling multi-color vignettes. A vignette is a technique where you put a soft shadow around the image to make everything else pop. Most of you have probably been doing it with Instagram for a while now, you just didn’t have a word for it. With multi-color vignettes, I take the two main colors in a company’s branding (in this case blue and yellow) and make a soft gradient on a solid, one color on the left and one on the right. I then use that to make the vignette, instead of the typical black, or sometimes white. It is one of the subtle things that most wouldn’t notice, but sometimes that is the motivation to do such things. They are small, unnoticeable, but yet they make things better.

The director and producer told me that the room the spots were shot in was about 100 ft deep, which is why the spots have great depth of field. While I can’t tell you what lens was used, I can tell you it was a zoom ENG type of lens on the Sony F900. So it begs the question, if you have the physical depth in the room, are prime lenses necessary compared to physical depth and great lighting? I will leave the argument to my DP friends, but I will tell you that these looked amazing on my Sony broadcast monitor. At this time I don’t have a side by side comparison, but I will tell you I did very little color grading on the image. This is basically right off tape. Little bit of luma, contrast and saturation.

Solidworks “Inventor Child”

December 19, 2011 · by bcleggtv

In the editing world, sometimes there are those projects that you just need to get through and then there are those that serve as a great example of why you do what you do. In 2010, Solidworks provided me with a project that provided such an example.

It is common practice, especially in the world of corporate video, to get bogged down by messaging and stats that we sometimes forget that video is one of the great tools to entertain and evoke emotions. A lot of marketers forget that if you focus on entertainment and emotion, those two things along can be the best tools to sell. Remember that Google commercial from the Super Bowl? It was the one everyone was talking about the next day at the office. It wasn’t funny, or had any sort of special effects, but it was clever and, most importantly, entertaining and evoked some sort of emotion. And everyone refereed to it as the Google Ad, not the commercial that went over the analytics of how many users use Google to search over their competition.

With this project, the goal of the video was to try and tap into the inner workings of CAD designers. If you can picture a stereotypical CAD designer, they were probably the ones who, growing up, were always tinkering with things. In short, they probably had the best tree house in the neighborhood. Well these same brilliant minds who made a dumbwaiter in that same clubhouse have also gone on to create some of the engineering marvels you see all around you everyday. Solidworks wanted to see the journey of such a person. The reason being, these were their main user base.

Mark Biasotti, Product Manager at Solidworks, and his team came up with the concept of the “Inventor Child,” someone who took their engineering passion and helped change the world. The term he kept using, which as you can see is very appropriate, was the concept of the emotional payoff. At each step of the protagonists engineering life, his ingenuity is helping those around him, but in the end it comes full circle and helps him. What I love about this video is that it sells a product without ever mentioning the product. It is only selling the idea.

This project was also a great example of what happens with great teamwork. Mark Biasotti was the creative lead on the client side, as well as acting as the After Effects compositor. It was directed by Bob Pascarella and Rich Sturchio. The video was shoot at 1080p/23.976fps on the Sony F900 by Robert Magro. Kerry Healey and Mark DiTondo were the lead producers on the project with Brian Iacobucci doing the final sound mix.

This project was shared heavily off-site from the edit suite, with the team at Sabertooth Productions out of California designing and compositing the 3D mechanics (the bunk bed lift, the lab scene as well as the mechanical hand.) We handled this with a pretty basic workflow, me making HD QuickTimes and sharing them over FTP with both Mark and Sabertooth. We worked natively at 1080p/23.976fps so that we were dealing with pull-down in the compositing stage.

We went though about 8 or 10 versions of this. The great thing about that was, unlike normal when each version just gets a little different, with this case each version got a little different and BETTER! It can be frustrating going back and forth on many different versions and you never feel that the project is getting any better. Luckily with “Inventor Child,” we were not dealing with that. Probably a good equation for success:

great concept + impeccable teamwork = fantastic end product

E3 Insider

December 17, 2011 · by bcleggtv

You may be surprised to hear it, but video games are not something that interests me. In fact, the only video game console I ever owned was the original 8-bit Nintendo system. You know, the one that game with Mario Bros and Duck Hunt? One of the projects I was lucky enough to work on in the past was the website/video project called E3 Insider. For those of you like me who may not know what E3 is, it is the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Basically the trade show for video games. On the of the unique aspects of this show is that it is invite only, meaning if you are part of the general public you can’t just buy a ticket or pass into the event like you could say with NAB. E3 is where ALL of the new announcements are made regarding video gaming. The organization that runs the trade show came to Cramer and asked “how can we get the experience of being at the show to the general public?” Our answer, a fully interactive website that gave you all aspects of the event, complete with press releases, blogs, game reviews and, what I am going to go over below, a video program from the show floor entitled “Floored” (clever, huh?)

The week started with the press conferences, which were done by each of the Big 3 (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.) These were held off-site from the convention center and acted as the main PR for each manufacturer. The press conferences is where the major announcements of things like the Wii, PlayStation 3 and XBOX were held.

Once the press conferences were done, we jumped right into the main part of our video program, which was the internet show “Floored.” In the first few years of this project (we did 4 years of the show) we actually did do a show, which aired three times a day. It was packaged with stand ups from our host Stacee Barcelata and usually featured 3 – 4 stories from whatever was covered thus far. What we found out was that by only pushing video content three times a day, our audience was literally just sitting there waiting for content. In our last two years we switched to a story by story format. This way we could push content to the site as it was done, providing our viewers with up to the minute content throughout the duration of the E3 show. Once each video was done, it was published to the web along with a blog post, pictures and other content.

What we did was basically set up a mini production house inside the LA convention center. We had 4 Avid Media Composer stations, an audio workstation and a compression workstation, all connected via a server. We also had a separate network for all the writers, producers and web developers. For shooting, we used Sony DVCAM 570 outfitted with Firestore digital recorders. Props to our two DPs John Coyne and Jim Flis who worked 16 hour days with these beasts. This project was done between the years of 2002 – 2006, so the workflow of digital recording was somewhat of a new concept. I remember the first year we were out there we even said “man, it would be great to not have to digitize all these tapes and instead use some sort of file.” The Firestore was the one of the first manufacturers of digital recorders. We set them up to record OMF files so we could import them right in the Avid, bringing with it all the TC information that corresponded to the tape. It was a great workflow. The stories would come in from the field, the DVCAM tapes were handed off to one of our 3 writers, the Firestore was handed off to Gary our IT tech who would then offload the Firestore to the server. The OMFs were then imported in the Avid. As far as the game play B-Roll, it was coming in a variety of formats, from Beta SP to DVCAM to digital files. Our audio/compressionsist Brian was taking all that and digitizing it in Sony Vegas in order to give us QuickTimes for import to edit with. All the while compressing all our stores with Agility Anystream, recording scratch VOs and doing a final mix for each Floored story. Brian was pretty much the MVP of our whole team, it would have been absolutely impossible to do it without him.

It really was the ultimate in teamwork. We were firing off up to 16 stories per day. I remember getting there around 7am, putting my Sony headphones on, start cutting and at some point I would take them off and it would be midnight.

I have mentioned some of the key players above, but here is a complete list of the amazing team who made this all possible:

Rob Everton – Program Lead
Lisa Ladurantaye-Lynch – Executive Producer
Leah Romig – Senior Producer/Production Coordinator
Dave Lynch – Editor
Kevin Zhang – Editor
Matt Galindo – Executive Web Developer
Colin Henson – Art Director
John Coyne – DP
Jim Flis – Director/DP
Brian Iacobucci – Audio Designer/Compressionist/All-Star
Devin Silberfein – Interactive Producer
Scott Palmer – Writer/FanCam Director
Gary Parker – IT/Network

iPad

December 16, 2011 · by bcleggtv

Well, I am going to make this post the first of hopefully many that are not related to a specific video project. As of today, I am the owner of a new Apple iPad. It actually complete the “i” trifecta for me. iPod, iPhone and now iPad. In reality I am testing out the app for updating this website on my iPad right now. It is very basic and it doesn’t have that instant preview option as the website from a laptop or CPU, which is something I am used to. Although this will be a great way to publish information quickly and on the go…or at least anywhere with a wifi connection.

My initial reaction to the iPad was “what am I going to use this for?” (the iPad I have was a gift, so you can see why I had this reaction instead of the calculated buying process I usually go through with any major product.)

As the owner of a laptop, as a person who works at an Avid workstation all day and, as I mentioned above, the owner of the other Apple gadgets, where does this gadget fit into my day to day needs. To put it simply, it doesn’t fit. I don’t need it, but I am keeping an open mind.

After a full day with the new toy, I have seen some uses that I may not have thought of before. The first being this post right here. One of my goals with this website is to not only showcase the video work I do but also to discuss new technologies. With the iPad, it gives me more flexibility to do this quickly and on the go.

The next major one is one I haven’t really tested out yet, more so because I am on vacation for the next week and won’t be in an edit suite for a little while. What I can envision is the iPad acting as my digital paper work. Scripts, change lists, branding guidelines, etc are all types of things I normally print out to go along with what I am editing. Lately I have been trying to do as much of this as I can on the iPhone, but for me the iPhone is just too small to really be effective. Hopefully the iPad will help me be more “green.”

One thing I would love to see, and not sure if this exists already, but some sort of app that a producer/director could open either on a laptop or iOS device that creates a list of tasks that could then be shared. When I get a list of changes I almost always print it out so I can physically check them off to know what I have done and what I need to do. It would be great to have some sort of shared list with the producer/director that I can go though and process and then send back, hopefully with comments. That way I could send info back such as “this change conflicts with branding guidelines” or “I think this edit is conflicting with our story goals” etc.

Of course there will be other things I can do with the iPad. Maybe my angry birds skills will improve. Not sure if digital books will work their way into my everyday life, but I also said that when iTunes came out. Can’t remember the last time I bought a CD, although I will say I don’t envision using the iPad for music listening.

Feel free to use the comments section to discuss what you use your iPads for, maybe there s something I haven’t thought of yet. I am sure there is.

Boston College: During My Years

December 11, 2011 · by bcleggtv

The Boston College Eagles football team is a Division 1 FCS team that plays in the ACC, a conference which includes perennial powerhouse programs such as Florida State, Miami, Clemson and Virginia Tech. Since their entry into the ACC in 2003, Boston College football has been more prevalent on the national stage, which means more TV time. Each year each school is given the opportunity to air a spot advertising their school on national TV, free of charge. Basically, it boils down to when ESPN is airing the BC vs. Florida State game, they are making money off of that so each school gets one free :30 spot.

This is the spot from the 2010 season titled “During My Years.” As you can see from the spot, you can tell why it is titled that. This spot was shot on the Sony F900 at 1080p/23.976fps. Like with any spot airing on TV, the deliverable has to be at 1080i/59.94fps. The footage was digitized using the Sony JH-3 with the 3:2 pull-down setting on, that way the footage was being digitized in the Avid Symphony at 1080i/59.94fps at Avid DNxHD 220Mbps 10-bit. There was also quite a bit of footage that was not shot by Cramer, specifically:

The hockey team celebration (ESPN – DVCPro HD)

Church interior with the candles (Boston College – XDCAM)

Mark Herzlich (ESPN – DVCPro HD)

Ballet Dancer (Boston College – HDV)

Torch Ceremony (Boston College – XDCAM)

As you can see, about 66% of the spot is from outside acquisitions. The Boston College footage was XDCAM and HDV at 1080i/59.94fps. I used the Avid 3:2 cadence to give it the 24P look. The ESPN footage came in on DVCPro HD 720. If memory serves me correctly that footage was sent out to Video Express and transfered to HDCAM. At the time we didn’t own a DVCPro deck and it was cheaper to have a quick dub made than to rent a deck for what turned out to be about 5 seconds of footage.

All the VO’s in the spot are actual Boston College students and are being read on-site with a boom mic. Normally VOs are done in a booth with a Pro Tools engineer, but given the fact the spot was shot at the campus and we had 12 separate lines of copy all read by different students, logistically it was easier to record them on-site. Things you may not know about the spot, the first shot of the chapel the sky is secondary color correction using Avid Symphony. The original shot was shot on a sunny day, but was done midday, so the sky still had a flatness to it. Not so much grey, but the blue was so light and de-saturated that I thought it could use a punch. The same was done on the last shot with the Eagle statue, but not as much.

The lasers in the physics lab were all done in post. They tried to shot them on set, but the laser was so light that the camera just wasn’t picking it up. I used After Effects and just drew a couple white lines with a blue and white glow added to them.

On the church interior with the candle lighting ceremony, I put a fairly heavy vignette on the color correction to draw the viewers attention to the candles, as well as added a hint of GenArts Sapphire Glare to them. The original shot was done with only the light from the candles and was extremely orange. I drew a couple masks with Avid Animatte to be able to keep the blue in the stained glass in the background and only apply the glare to the candles.

Boston College: Sports

December 11, 2011 · by bcleggtv

Disclaimer: I am NOT a Boston College sports fan. In 2002 I graduated from the prestigious University of Massachusetts at Amherst. But, having worked more closely to Boston than Amherst, Boston College provides more content for sports and, while I hate to admit it, they are the premiere college in New England for sports, except UCONN for men’s and women’s basketball.

Two sports projects I have been involved with are football and hockey, two sports that are main objectives in Chestnut Hill. Hockey in particular has been a powerhouse for years, having won 3 national championships in the last decade. Each year Cramer works on projects for each of these programs. The football recruiting video, which is an NFL Films style video that highlights the year for the team and acts as a recruiting tool for new players. In fact, up until his passing in 2009 Harry Kalas was used as the voice over talent. Since then, Joe Giotta has been lending his voice and picking up where Kalas left off.

This the open for the 2009 video. The main piece was edited by Vincent Higgins and written and directed by David Trainor. I used Avid to cut the footage and brought it into After Effects to do the composite. What I did was create a canvas at 1920 x 1080 and put the SD video on that 5 times. Video CoPilot’s Riot Gear was used to create the background and the grunge vignette. Since I had an HD canvas and an SD output, I used that to create the swish pans you see. I just moved it between the 5 continuous streams to create the swish pans. You can see what the 5 streams look like around 1:24 in the video.

Above is the 2010 Pike’s Peak Hockey video. At the end of each hockey season they hold a banquet for all the players, coaches, parents and supporter’s of the program. As you can tell, the video is ridiculously long (total running time of 10:30.) While something like this should really run at no more than say 5 minutes, just remember who the audience is for this. It is specifically for the team, so almost every goal and good save from the season is used. The video is broken up into 3 specific sections. The first is the Foo Fighters song which is the regular season. The Muse song is from the Beanpot (the mid-season Boston hockey tournament between BC, BU, Northeastern and Harvard.) The last being the Lupe Fiasco song which is the Hockey East tournament. I used Avid to do this entire video except for the logo open and the BC logo transition, which I made in After Effects but did an overlay with GenArts Sapphire Layer effect.

Boston Globe: Beyond the Headlines

December 11, 2011 · by bcleggtv

Back in 2004, Cramer partnered with the Boston Globe to create a 3 hour long documentary about Boston’s greatest sports stories told through the eyes of the writers, editors and photographers who covered these memorable events. The actual documentary was edited by Jim Ferguson, who now works at the Outpost at WGBH working on Frontline. If you get the chance, make sure to watch this documentary, if anything for the 23 minutes on the 2004 Red Sox World Series win. This whole project was done two days before the Red Sox won their first World Series in 86 years, so as you can imagine, the presses were stopped and the Red Sox story became the final crescendo to the whole documentary. Having been a Red Sox fan for as long as I can remember, I have seen multiple recaps of the 2004 post-season, and only two are worth watching. The ESPN 30 for 30 4 Days in October is extremely well done, and the final chapter of this Boston Globe documentary. And don’t forget, the Boston Globe recap was edited in only 3 days. The ESPN documentary was probably done over at least a year.

My involvement in the project was two fold. First, I was the DVD author for the final product that was going to be sold in stores. This meant I was responsible for the encoding of 3+ hours of content, menu mapping and testing. In fact, I think if I was to hunt in my archives I may even still have the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet I used for my “bit budget,” which I used to figure out how much bit rate I could encode each video with in order to fit it on the dual layer DVD.

Second, I was picked to edit these vignettes (as we were calling them) for NESN in order to advertise the project being on sale to the general public. They were played going into breaks on Sports Desk during the Red Sox playoff run. These pieces were also the first real edit I ever did in my career. I had worked on multiple other things, but at that point I wasn’t officially an editor, a junior editor maybe if I were grasping at straws. Luckily there were some schedule conflicts and they needed someone quick, and I was available. To go along with the sports theme of this post it was almost like when Drew Bledsoe went down and they had to call on the backup, and the backup took over and never looked back. Don’t get me wrong, I am not comparing my skills as an editor to Tom Brady, but these videos definitely had a part in launching my career and I will always have a soft spot in my heart for them.

I have up-converted these videos to HD from DEBTA tape using a Sony HDW-M2000 HDCAM deck. All the interviews were shot in Cramer’s large studio in 16×9 Digital Beta and run through a Sony DVE with a film look on it (basically gave it a 3:2 pull-down look.) The main documentary, as well as these vignettes, was a 4×3 program. You can tell specifically in the 1980 Hockey Team piece as the clock is cut off on my 16×9 HD up-convert in Al Michaels famous call from the Soviet game. The interviews were letter-boxed and all the B-ROLL was 4×3, including the flat art. The flat art was actually shot on DVCAM using a traditional robotic flat art stand. I would imagine everyone does their flat art digitally now, I know I do. There was something nice about having a physical tape though. No rendering, just cut in the move you need.

Looking back, there are probably some things I would have done differently now that I have a bunch of years under my belt. One thing that always stands out for me is in the Pedro Martinez piece the color correction on Troy O’Leary’s grand slam. I would have tried to do some secondary color-correction on the field dirt so it looked brown and not gray. I also may have pushed to put the opening VO/text quotes on some sort of newspaper treatment instead of just white text on black, but honestly that is me just being nit-picky, since it does work as is.

It was really at this point that I realized what I love about editing is story telling. Granted, guys like Bob Ryan, Leigh Montville and Dan Shaughnessy are natural story tellers, but to be able to take all of their stories and make one compelling one is something that is, well for lack of a better more elegant phrase, just plain awesome.

Jordan’s Furniture

December 4, 2011 · by bcleggtv

Whenever someone asks me on the street what I do for a living, I always say I am a video editor. In theory, I could say “film editor” since I have edited many films, but in reality they have all been shot on video, not film. After I say video, most times the next question is “what is that?” Jordan’s Furniture has always been my example to illustrate what I do for those not in the know. Jordan’s Furniture has been a staple of local business in Eastern Massachusetts for a number of years. Their TV spots have changed over the years, but they have always been a cornerstone of their brand.

There are many things that I enjoy about editing Jordan’s Furniture spots. For one, they are always a quick turnaround so they don’t drag on for days. A typical schedule would be shoot on Monday, digitize and edit Tuesday, make final revisions and traffic Wednesday. Sometimes there is another day added onto that, but if it does there are probably at least 4 or 5 spots going to air. There are even times we are trafficking on day 2.

The other reason that Jordan’s edits are great is the client I get to work with. It has, over the years, become a true partnership in the edit and I am sure any other editor out there would agree that is a truly great place to be. The days we edit, the client just comes right on in, sits down, we’ll Monday Morning quarterback about the recent New England Patriots win and then get right into it. Usually by this time I have the footage digitized and edited, sans final graphics. Sometimes they go over well, sometimes they don’t, but they are always meet with a mutual agreement that we’ll do whatever is right for the spot, and everyone’s opinion matters. There is a high level of trust in the edit suite and it just makes the whole experience worthwhile.

All the Jordan’s Furniture commercials are shot on a Sony F900 HDCAM at 1080p/23.976fps. Since all broadcast spots need to be delivered at 1080i/59.94fps, the footage is digitized with a Sony JH-3 with the pulldown setting on, so the footage is in the Avid at 1080i/59.94fps, usually at DNxHD 220-10bit. The exception is when chroma key is used, since keying footage that has pulldown on it creates questionable results. When this is the case, the spot is cut 1080i/59.94fps but a 3:2 cadence motion effect is added after that fact. HDCAM really runs at 135MB/sec, but by working in DNxHD 220 10-bit all the graphics can be at that higher bit rate. Also, since most spots are now delivered digitally it gives the compression step the highest possible quality source to make the files from.

One thing you will notice on a lot of Jordan’s Furniture are deals that includes TVs. All graphics that live in those TVs are done in post-production. If the TV always resides in the frame, the Avid 3d Warp tool and 4 points tracking will usually suffice. When the TV comes from off-screen I’ll use Mocha for After Effects since it is a planar tracker. In fact, now I would even say that I will rely mostly on Mocha since it yields good results. One thing I do have to do is do that composite at 1080p/23.976fps and then import that composite at 1080i/59.94. Trying to do tracking shots on footage with pull down will create bumpy tracks. One thing I do with the track is I track in just a solid color (usually red since it makes it easy to see where in lies in relation to the edges) and then do the graphics in a separate sequence or comp. This acts as my master track and is replaced by the sequence or comp with the graphics. I use this workflow whether I am doing the composite in After Effects or Avid. The graphics are usually what change the most during the editing process, so by doing it this way I don’t have to re-track every time there is a logo or text change.

The above spot was actually moved up a day or two so they could do the shoot at Fenway in the snow. Needless to say that, while it definitely helped for the spot, the on-site production crew wouldn’t have objected to a sunnier day!

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